One Ring Scarf

I take no responsibility for any electronic equipment that was damaged from drool caused by looking at these pictures.  I may take responsibility for nerdgasms, depending on the reaction caused by the nerdgasm.  I am quite pleased with how this turned out.  >^.^<

 Around Christmas time my mother sent me an email alerting me of this pattern.  The whole family had fallen in love with it, and I was no exception.  (Yeah, I was raised a nerd/geek.)  Besides J.R.R. Tolkien is my dad's favorite author.  There was no way we could have lived in that house for that long and not known about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.  It was not possible.  This is a scarf patterned after The One Ring.

This scarf is double knit.  I learned how to double knit just to make this scarf.  I found that I absolutely love double knitting.  There are two different tutorials on youtube that helped.  They are both multiple videos long, but I will post the first one of each here.  Double knit tutorial and Spider-Man/Venom scarf tutorial.  It has opened up a whole new set of ideas for me.  (More projects to come later. >^.~<)  These are pictures of the "front" and "back" of the scarf.  The yellow side is "front."

My first big challenge was finding fingering weight yarn that was cheep and not wool.  I'm allergic to wool, and about 95% of all fingering weight yarns I found seemed to be wool.  This is also the same yarn weight that people use to make socks, and I was looking in winter.  I found a few none wool yarns, but they wanted $30 a skein, and I would need about 16 skeins of some of them.  Enough to total 800 yards of yarn per color like the pattern says.  After an hour or two of looking I finally found this yarn.  It was cotton, cheap, and I would only need 8 skeins total.  :D!  After the yarn came in I couldn't have been more pleased with it.  It is soft, warm, and makes an excellent scarf.  :D!!!!

My second challenge was limiting how much I worked on it.  I had tendonitis in both hands during high school and a number of years afterwards.  It has gotten to the point that I can do anything I want to pain free, but I have to not over do it when it comes to knitting.  In all honesty I think picking up knitting was what helped me over come the tendonitis.  It helped build up my hand strength and dexterity again.  Where Aikido helped me with hand flexibility.  I love both activities, and do them as often as I can.  Yet, while making this I over did the knitting quite a few times, and I had to rest my hands for a day or so afterwards.

This is also the very first scarf that I opted to add fringe too.  I think it adds a nice touch to the overall look of the scarf.  >^.~<